Safer Bike Helmet Crumples Before You Stop, Inspired by a Bird

The unique design of a woodpecker and the cycling crash where he landed on his head has led Londoner Anirudha Surabhi to come up with a more effective design for a bike helmet.

The woodpecker pecks at about ten times per second and every time it pecks it sustains the same amount of force as us crashing at 50 miles per hour,” says Surabhi. “It’s the only bird in the world where the skull and the beak are completely disjointed, and there’s a soft corrugated cartilage in the middle that absorbs all the impact.”

In order to mimic the woodpecker’s crumple zone, Anirudha turned to a cheap and easily accessible source – paper.

He engineered it into a double-layer of honeycomb that could then be cut and constructed into a functioning helmet.